Forget the Nations League: this is a rare opportunity for the England manager to perfect his tactics against superior sides
There is a website called The Size of Belgium that for more than a decade has been dutifully tracking the Anglophone world’s curiously enduring habit of using the country’s area as a rhetorical unit of measurement. For example, “an area the size of Belgium” is lost globally to deforestation each year, according to the United Nations. The search area for missing flight MH370 was described in several media outlets as “the size of Belgium”. The Lonely Planet guidebook, meanwhile, refers to Yorkshire as “half the size of Belgium”.
How did Belgium ascend to this exalted status? Not, you have to assume, through any intimate or widespread knowledge of the precise area of Belgium (at 30,000 square kilometres, it’s barely twice the size of Yorkshire). Perhaps it is because, on some level, Belgium manages to convey both slightness and weightiness in the same breath. It lies in the grey area between small and significant. It can, in other words, mean anything you want it to mean.
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